personal blog from fALk v010

25.02.09

60 sites with free 3d models - 150+ sites with videotools

Via twitter come two really valuable links that I think are in the scope of myself very much. One has links and explanations to 150+ pages of video tools that you can use online - it ranges from video sharing, editing, streaming to commenting and hoarding. The other is personally even more useful - it contains 60 sites that sport free as in beer 3d models. Countless of times I needed a very generic object just to populate a scene and have looked on the three lousy sites known to me without luck.

21.02.09

European Banking System needs 16 Trillion Euros... Collapse near.

An article in The Telegraph has tripped off the internet. They originally reported that the European Union needs 16.3 Trillion Euros very very soon (end of this month?) to stabilize the banking system. Then they pulled the number from the headline - but lots of bloggers where already on it by then - then 24 hours later they put the headline back in - I have been following this and saw the double change happening - not only did they took out the number in the headline but also originally removed it from the article. After it was clear that there where screenshots and google caches out the number got back in but the tone of the article was softened. They cite a secret report circulating through EU governments about severity of the problem. 16 Trillion is more then double the GDP of the EU - it means the only way to find 16 Trillion is printing it - that in return means a hyperinflation on the level of Simbabwe. Germany - the article says - is the only country in the EU at the moment that does not need a total or partial bailout (no its not about banks anymore its about countries) but since its in the EU its in the same boat as everyone else.
This together with the S&P under the panic point of 775 since yesterday - we have a hell of an "interesting" week in front of us. Maybe it was not just pure coincidence that the german CSU Consumerminister (? verbraucherministerin) Ilse Aigner urged germans to start hording food?

to make you all feel good and for my own sanity (meaning - its always good to know that I am not the only one thinking its all gonna crash very very soon - smarter humans then this artificial lifeform in its early stage of knowledge gathering are coming to the same conclusions):

Renowned investor George Soros said on Friday the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis.

Soros said the turbulence is actually more severe than during the Great Depression, comparing the current situation to the demise of the Soviet Union.

"We witnessed the collapse of the financial system," Soros said at a Columbia University dinner. "It was placed on life support, and it's still on life support. There's no sign that we are anywhere near a bottom."

18.02.09

We Can. Letīs think together?

There is one of the most fantastic threads ever on the internet initiated by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing. I applaud the influencer's coming around and become more political and the corresponding comment thread shows why this is so important. Its a slice through society and shows the problem with stemming any kind of transformation. But one thing stuck out which I had to reply to there but I donīt want my reply burried there so I put it out front here. NYAM #58 said:

"We have so much collective intelligence and we can't think our way out of this?"

"We can. Let's think together!"

to which I replied:
It would be lovely to see all the worlds intellect that is not centered on self interest but rather on advancement of human society actually got together and formulate a powerful enough message of unity to actually go against the status quo. The problem is that the intellectuals are individuals with their own self centered universe. They can give great ted talks or collect 2 mio friends on facebook but most have failed again and again to get out of their self centered self promotional world and actually get involved with something really transformative that does not primarily advance them self.
I think for a transformative movement to form it has to get much much worse and then it might just be too late.
I am quite happy to see some of the more influential people come around and at least acknowledge that there is a problem. But unless there is a voice of unity calling for fundamentally changing our society quite soon I have not much hope for the general future. And the voice also would need to be put in action which is hard because that takes time and resources and reading through the comments - those people who are affected most are either working 5 jobs or are watching TV and having a depression the others say "oh its not so bad - sure the shops around me close and generally there is a distress but MY family is just fine".
If something does indeed form that has not one person doing self-centered self-promotion - something that is sound peaceful and in synch with earth and advancement of society - I am all on board but I am skeptical that this can happen with one part of society "we need a strong leader" sheep and the other "its me me me" wolfs.

Yes there are projects (Transition Towns (as mentioned by 13Strong #64) and Transition Cultures (as mentioned here before with the Oamaru Declaration Of Independence and of course justfortheloveofit) out there but there is a reason that they are not gaining critical mass to come out of the closet. Influencers are loosing as much as bankers in a positive future and most would loose their influence on fellow beings and hence power so they are not really supporting projects that they are not influencing - its based on the same problematic power structure that has been happening since the Romans.

To get out of it we need to get over wanting to be leaders or wanting to be followers but become transformers. Transformers are people who show through their action how to transform the world into a habitable loving beautiful place. Technology has and should have a place but so should nature and our planet and our collective consciousness. Then we might have a chance of survival. A leader will not bring us there and passive people following will neither.

17.02.09

The TED talks that nails it all.

It has been posted everywhere and the reason is that this TED talk explains the problem and solution as precise as it can be defined in a humorous easily digestible way. The only thing we need to find out now is how to fasten and embrace the reboot and make the transition gentle to our planet that enabled us to get there.

Procedural City Building

Introversion the makers of the great Defcon game have released some videos about their upcoming game Subversion. Man this procedural city building extremely rocks - I hope this can somehow be used for exporting to be used for other 3d scenes.

/b/ is where the internet goes to die.

/b/ is where the internet goes to die. Its a place where both God and Satan vow to stay away from. /b/ is where every internet meme ever ends up. /b/ is rule 34. /b/ in is my mind forever. You cant undo /b/, but you can undo your search history.

16.02.09

Finance Minister Of Japan Drunk at G7?

Word in the tubes is that the finance minister of Japan was drunk during the recent G7 meetings - you can judge for yourself if it is true or not - I donīt really blame him. His country just announced that its economy shrunk by 12.7%.

On a related note here is the first plausible definition of what the difference between a recession and a depression is in financial terms.

Recession: The economy will recover. Just be smart and be patient.

Depression: The economy won't recover. After 10+ years, the methods of investment will be permanently changed to something significantly different.

Update: The Minister has resigned after Japanese Press put the story out big time and the Japanese Prime Minister was ashamed for his country.

15.02.09

Number Radio Stations

Amazing Todd when he was here showed me a link to a website that has the weirdest collection of audioables ever seen on the web. Irdial is apparently a former record label gone bust putting all their content on the web for anyone to enjoy. If you are into noise and other ambient stuff you will loose a couple of days on the site. For example there is a CD with just sonar sounds or space weather. Generally a lot of mostly field recorded soundwaves sometimes put together with music sometimes just standing on their own.
What for me really stood out has not much to do with noise or ambience but with a phenomenon that I have never heard before but when I heard it I actually remembered listening to it in my childhood -> Number Radio Stations.
These are radio stations that consist of nothing more then a person reading seemingly random numbers. I had no clue about the history of them or what their purpose is or where they come from or why they exist. But luckily there is a whole book(let) that comes with the CDs nicely downloadable in PDF format that teaches us about the intrinsic function of number stations - it reads like a fiction novel if you are a geek type of person its pure number pr0n. Matter of fact its the most secure form of passing on encoded information that exists.

What Numbers Stations are.
Numbers Stations are radio broadcasts that appear in the Shortwave bands twenty-four hours a day, on many different frequencies. They are used to transmit short text messages. There are three different types of broadcast; voices reading groups of numbers or phonetic letters, Morse transmissions sending groups of numbers or letters and noise stations, transmitting several different types of noise.
What Numbers Stations are not.
Numbers Stations are not licensed in the conventional sense, and there is no easy to find information on any aspect of Numbers Stations from the government agencies that are concerned with radio use/misuse. They are not weather forecasts, or shipping broadcasts.

If that hooks you, you oughta read the rest of the booklet (pdf).
It has lots of very deep indepth information in it that you didnīt know that you always wanted to know. Especially for people interested in crypto and number crunching.

If you are more into making music or just like to listen to numbers/letters beeing spelled seemingly randomly by nice haunting voices for hours or maybe wanna crack some of the code:
There are 1234 CDs in The Conet Project full of number station recording in different languages different presenters. A remix is in order! - *eyes glancing over to certain musicians....*

My current push-media fix

I have a disdain for oldschool massmedia as most people probably know by know but modern massmedia has its merits if it adheres to serve the citizens instead of the interests of business or politics. So I have a couple of massmedia fixes for myself that I think are standing out tall and proud from the rest - that is of course personal taste.

Talk Radio:BBC World Service - hands down. The quality of the shows the indepth information they cram into 30 minute shows the quality of guests and talkers has no match anywhere else. They try to be balanced as hell - even taking a lot of flack (recently for "siding" with Palestinians). Their economy outlook report is just telling how it is ("nobody has a clue" and "sorry is not the word bakers mean when they say it"). I LOVE the presenters all around - they have wit, speak gorgeous english and are speaking fast enough for anyone with attention deficits. The combiniation of culture, technology, politics, trivia is amazing - personally they could leave out the sports sections but its really like only shorts about sports anyway. The "from the ground" reports are greatly produced - making as much from the medium radio that you can. Listening to them is just making the stories come alive in your imagination. They integrate listeners feedback constantly replying to listener comments or just letting listener comments stand on its own (which I think is great to avoid flame wars).
The best show is "The Forum" every sunday morning. Its a roundtable discussion that gets together three people (+ the host) from a very wide array of professional fields and the intellectual discussion you can hear there are of a different kind - eye opening, amusing, high educational in value and mostly useful for the advancement and understanding of mankind.

Music Radio:
Well I listen only to webradio when it comes to blast my ears with music as I do not posses a lot of music on my local harddrives (number of songs residing locally can be counted on two hands) and since I kind of need music to get going when I am working its almost constantly on. Five stations that have chrystalized over the years as worthy of constant listening: DubLab - if you want to hear crazy strange whicked experimental jazzy handmade urban suburban african mexican or whatever you can think of kind of music in a low bpm range with a lot of dub underneath this is the station to listen to - but be warned it sometimes gets very headfucked and there could be a rotation of shows a bit more often as you do sense the repeats quite frequently. NinjaCuts - Ninja Tunes makes radio its almost always possible to listen to them if you like electronic music. Sometimes its really great and you wanna get up and dance - which is rather silly on your own in the office but energy it gives you nonetheless.RadioGlitch - a bit more on the "commercial" side of electronic music its when you really need some danceble music that is four to the floor with dubby parts broken beats and lots of glitchy bitchies. DubTerrain.net - Dubstep, D&B and Dub on the cutting edge - a bit heavy sometimes with a lot of hard D&B but good if you are in a down mood and still need to get stuff done - better then coffee. ;)

TV:
I am trying to not pollute my visual senses too much as I found it hinders my imagination and creativity but I do like very well made documentaries. The best over all documentary presentation I have found so far must be PBS Frontline: The 60 minute shows are completely viewable in nice 12 minute chunks on their gorgeous (so a bit unnecessarily flash heavy) website. They include "learn more see more get more" links throughout the shows inside the video player to click on. For example to see a full interview if it interests you and not just the excerpt you see in the film you can just click on a link that appears when the interview is shown. Also it includes viewers comments when there is a hot topic beeing talked about. The shows are enourmously well researched and always sport this threaded story that just doesnīt let you go. The whole endeavor is people sponsored - the camera work is mostly amazing. Only quivvle I have had with it was the Hugo Chavez documentary which I thought was a tiny bit biased but the rest I saw is pretty balanced. There will be one called "Inside the Meltdown" on Feb. 17th that I really look forward :)

The only other visual tubes programming I probably donīt have to mention but I do it anyway as there are still people who have not heard about the amazingTED talks: Taped at the TED conference this highly intellectual tribe of people try to show off positive technology and ideas and thoughts that can transform the world. The talks are short and of the highest intellectual order - you might have heard about Bill Gates releasing Mosquitos - that was a TED talk. There are many more similarely shocking and eye opening (the much cited other one is the woman who is a brain specialist had a stroke - lost half her brain temporarily and speaks about her research on herself by bringing a real brain with the spinal cord attached to the stage). No matter what topic you are into you will find something of importance to you there I can guarantee that - oh and the talks are highly addictive - lots of people have seen them all - a couple of month constant viewing that is. You will be a smarter person afterwards - guaranteed.

Now these are pretty much my main massmedia consumption patterns. I would love to hear if you have others additional ones that just stand out from the pack as something special and noteworthy. I would be delighted if you leave a comment.

PoD: Bliss is ignorance - happiness is fiction

This image is from the blissisignorance.com guys who who say some interesting thought provoking and outright funny things about depression (it has to be embraced at points for a healthy mind). There are more hilarious photos like these on the flickr stream and nice depressing music on the website.

13.02.09

Speaker of the Taliban uses EiPhone

Apparently the Al Jazeera Reporter Hamish Macdonald interviewing the Taliban Speaker Mullah Zaif saw how the guy took out an iPhone. Mullah Zaif said "the internet is addictive on this thing, very fast". Apple supporting the terrorists you should have known that, now every iPhone user is a suspected terrorist....

Samsung releases first true green Cellphone with solar power

Normally I reserve these link for our radio show but since we are still waiting for a software fix to continue our regular scheduled programming and this must count as the most wow announcement in the cellphone market since the EiPhone I think I must help spread the word.
Samsung will release its first full solar powered cellphone to the (european?) masses on February 16th. Its not only solar powered its also made out of recycled water bottles, packaged in recycled (downcycled) paper includes a pedometer (stepcounter) telling you how many trees you have saved by actually walking to the supermarket rather then driving. It sports a touch screen (no multitouch probably because of Apples technology hindering patents) and generally looks rugged but gorgeous. I have been pondering for a while what my next phone would be and while I am lured into the iPhone camp I canīt pull myself through to actually get locked in with a vendor also the only function that I really admire with the iPhone - GPS - has been proven unworkable and too unprecise in situation where I would use it (the woods the mountains and beyond) - so I guess my new phone that I get in autumn has just been revealed and I think they have a true winner on their hands.

12.02.09

YouTube goes CC and Micropayment!

Google has announced that YouTube will let users include Creative Commons Licenses and make files available for download either free or for a "small" fee through GoogleCheckout. That is a killer move in a lot of ways. First its great publicity for CC of course - so they reallyreally have to figure out how to a) enforce their license better b) find a final solution to the pesky embed problem - especially with YouTube.
That it might finally make micropayments possible is the other side - not only possible but enforce them. Wonder if their will be "GoogleCredits" soon - where you buy a bunch for $10 and then pay with them - basically Google making its own currency - at the moment they canīt really make profit with sub $1 transactions (or they have figured out a way to do it). Interesting to watch progress on this front - even so its evil angel google.

10.02.09

1234567890 - epoch time

Here you have the countdown for the day hour minute second the universe converges with the standard unix time which then reaches the sequence 1234567890 - the day is (this) friday the 13th.
If you are on a Unix system (like MacOSX) you can see the current epoch time by putting date +%s in the terminal.

9.02.09

Tribes

And while we are at the topic of tribes and somehow stuff magically appears in front of me (or gets send to me by awesome people) there is this really eye opening interview at wired with the author of the book "tribes" explaining what a tribe is and why its so cool to embrace them.

Wired: You've said that a tribe doesn't have to be encouraged to connect, they want to connect with each other. And that you as the person in the center aren't required to do anything.

SG: That part's not true. It requires you to do a great deal. But what you don't need to do is sell people on the fact that they want to connect. That's human nature. We want to connect with like-minded people. What you have to do that's very difficult is create the platform - whether it's a cocktail party or a technology - where people can get over social friction, where people can make connections that would ordinarily feel awkward.

Awesome almost portable Reality to Internet Interface.

These guys at MIT have hacked together a device that acts as a multitouchtouch interface screen on anything - and its almost wearable. You can go into a bookstore an have a camera scan the face of the book and display amazon star rating on the real life book. Then you can have it read stuff to you. Or you can make temporary graffity in the UBahn while you are bored. Or see how green a product is in the supermarket. Reality to virtual interfaces in all forms are the next big thing - the wii was just the tiny beginning.
Full article on wired.

Time spend for corporate owned social sites = lost time

I have written about this before and I know I had been right then but I had no real data to back it up. The topic is that if you spend time on social networks or other datacollecting enteties it is very much time better spend somewhere else. You are bound to loose your data and your time at one point or it gets sold to a company that you might be inclined not to support or the company you put all your stuff in turns evil.

But here two examples of late.
First my favorite bookmarking site ma.gnolia.com went down the tubes - they had a unrecoverable data loss - meaning all people spending time there putting their bookmarks up, commenting on them making lovely tags and sharing them in groups with like - minded people have lost everything they did - it happened over night without forewarning. Technical glitch and everything just gone - now you can say this could happen to everyone - but everyone would maybe cared enough about their own data to make a backup of a backup of a backup (and as it happened I made a backup - the first one ever - just one day before saving my bookmarks from doom). While I was lucky there are a LOT of very pissed people out there who lost everything (one person could recover 80 bookmarks out of 80000!). Now the reason I moved to magnolia in the first place was because there was the first round of talks between microsoft and yahoo - microsoft buying all assets of yahoo and de.licio.us the "first" real bookmarking site was bought up by yahoo - needless to say that the last thing I would want is my link collection (nice datamine) in the hands of microsoft.
This could all be put under anectotal evidence if it wouldnīt be for a second event to happen. Apparently google is deleting blog posts of bloggers on their blogger.com network that talk about certain bands. This seems to come from pressure of the RIAA.

Id received the labels press releases and followed their directions, spending my time and energy to promote their albums, explains a frustrated Spaulding. By pulling down my post, they destroyed my intellectual creativity, the very same thing theyre erroneously accusing me of doing. Say someone had linked to that post, or [blog aggregator] Hype Machine  its gone completely. If I go into my Blogger table of contents, its gone. Not de-published  gone.

Now I would be sympathetic with this guy but everybody who does not understand that putting your work and time in other peoples hand makes that content fair game for anything should get their hands off the internet asap. Sadly I see even figures that I admire for their advancement in the net in the past blindly following the herds into all the great web2.0 land where the roses are blue and the sky nicely pink with glittery lickable interfaces on top. I think it has to take one of the big social networking sites to go down (and I predict a bankruptcy of myspace or facebook in the coming 12 month) for people to realise that all they have done the last 4+ years was putting their time and energy into the hands of some megacorps that in turn sold their datamines and gave a shit about the actual content published.

The only exception I see here are volatile services that donīt preserve data well in the first place. The glorified chat blabber at Twitter might be one of those services where a loss is not the biggest problem except if you really care about the follower number that you tried to build so hard over the years that could also vanish. Generally it would be very healthy if tribes would find each other and make innertribe services that offer these - often quite mundane and easy to copy - corporate controlled services. And then develop an open in all senses of the word protocol where all these individual services could talk together (web 3.0 proposes the underlying architecture for that by making all content truly portable with nice xml semantic file sent along explaining everything about the data that can be expressed). This would take away a lot of freedom of speech pressure from the net itself because a highly linked but de-central aproach would not be so easy to attack (as in the case of the RIAA suing google f.e. and having a big hit with it because it controls so much data - imagine them having to sue 20.000 sites individually). It would also put an end to the "all these services donīt have a bussiness plan" problem as these services are then under the control of the community which might want to fund them too or has enough volunteers to run them on no dime - also infrastructe would not need to be as massive as with a world wide service - taking also load off the world wide net and localizing things (my guess is that most photos taken that are private photos are also just watched in the same country - yet here we go and save the photos on the other side of the planet on an unknown location and each time when grandpa wants to look at them they are generating traffic around the globe).
There are lots of more positive points to make an re-open the internet and make it tribe based. Otherwise we will all have a facebook Operating System soon because the majority of people wants that (just look at the "task bar" to see that they are working in that direction very clearly).

6.02.09

E-Paper at last

The thing you see in Sci Fi movies - moving wallpapers and newspapers that update as the news happen. It has been a long time coming with first time mention of a working e-paper technology was like 10 years ago at least. While there have been ebook readers in first generation and magic ones with unicorn hairs embedded the real first epaper that really knocks me of my feet is the one shown here at a Taiwanese Book show. Impressive big clear crisp paper like and even the cmyk colors are there. Now just holographic storage quantum computing and some solution to the pesky energy problem and we are all set for a sciFi future

Good bye 4:3

As I am wrapping up my current project I think I also wrap up the last project I will ever do in 4:3 format. It has been long time in the coming and now with resolutions going up so does 4:3 go away. I am not shedding a single tear. 16:9 and beyond is so much nicer to layout with. You can have split screen and whatnot. Needless to say that I am also stopping to VJ in 4:3. It just never immerses you. It is always this oddly shaped window that does not adhere to any emotional feeling. When the screen stands out then people are not immersing and fact of the matter is that we humans just have greater horizontal perception then vertical (clouds are nice to look at but never threatening - same can be said for moles). Interestingly enough the medium where the 4:3 aspect ratio came from was film - which has stopped using this aspect ratio when 8mm was abonded about 30 trillion years ago. TV was born when film primarily used 4:3 itself. TV needed 35 years to make the switch to at least 16:9 - needless to say that film - even in its digital form - has even moved beyond that but then a 3:1 monitor would probably look strange.

Good bye 4:3 for the good things to come (full immersive).

Have a look at the wikipedia entry for the trazillion different aspect ratios out there.

5.02.09

crowdSpring the end of the design bussiness

It had to happen and I like how it happens. The bussiness I trained for in long years will not be the same anymore. CrowdSpring is a website aimed at destroying the "professional" design market once and for all - that is the multithousand dollar design projects that made circular logos with helvetica. What the website does is let a company make an offer for designs like logos, website etc. For example a logo goes between $200-$1000 at the moment - thats about the money a professional design firm asks just to come to the first meeting. Then everyone and their dog can submit logos and the design company can then select the one they want and the recipient gets the money - no matter where he/she is - in bed or in the high decorated office with the $2000 lean back chair. I am more then certain that this will catch on big time and in the process will probably completely wipe out the "pro" design market with its (wo)man in black. This is especially true in a time when firm want to cut costs and there are more firms doing inhouse design for the more complex stuff (like supervising a CI).
So if you need a logo go to crowdSpring offer $300 and get 1000 custom made for you to choose from in return.